I bought a new Apple Watch for my wife. She has a 1st gen iPhone SE (she just loves it and doesn’t want to upgrade). The watch won’t work with her phone - obviously something I should have checked into before purchasing. Is there anything I can do? Like maybe swap the watch out for an earlier model?
Zndl points out correctly that the trick is to not update the watch past watchOS 8. I would hope the watch series 7 would still ship with watchOS 8.
The most recent watch that maxes out at watchOS 8 is the series 3 but that one is pretty underpowered, so I’d have a hard time recommending it.